Book Review : Mountain Tales - Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings by Saumya Roy
Neither brick walls nor blue tarpaulin can render the destitute and detritus invisible.
Mountain Tales - Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings by Saumya Roy shows how all trails of excessive urban consumerism lead to the Deonar trash mountains in Mumbai. Rotten food, plastic bottles, medical waste, broken glass, twisted wires, construction debris, even piles of old notes after demonetization arrived at this township, spread over 326 acres. Here, the waste lingered without being composted or incinerated, letting trash peaks rise as high as 120ft.
An area set aside to keep out the deadly plague during an outbreak in 1897, the Deonar mountains have only grown over decades, smoldering and spewing out benzene at times and raging relentlessly at other times, choking the city with toxic methane halo.
The author, a journalist-activist, chronicles the lives of rag pickers who braving stray dogs and scavengers, inhaling fetid gaseous concoction, risking a silent burial under soft heaps of trash during monsoon & dodging monstrous bulldozers and forklifts made these trash hills their home. Their eyes, trained over years, quickly distinguished the glint of a metal from transparent glass & colored plastics. Sustained efforts from the municipality couldn't evict them from this world they knew, one where others' refuse met their wants.
Farzana, daughter of ragpicker Hyder Ali Shaikh, is the principal character in this book with a sizable cast. Born at the foot of these trash hills, her life and fate almost always aligns with it. Together they grow and strange twists leave their future in lurch around the same time.
The author throws light on red tapism that underlines most government projects. Plans to constrict Deonar, turn waste to compost & energy remain in a perennial limbo despite earnest resolution attempts in the city high court by Justice Oka committee. We nod in agreement when the renowned judge Oka remarks - "After becoming a judge I realised .. the real challenge before our legal system is not of docket [legal case file] explosion but of docket exclusion".
That the garbage crisis is universal is substantiated well with examples from Delhi, New York, Addis Ababa and Campania, Italy.
"Can you ever repair a house while you are living in it?" is a question raised in the book, the author uses this to hint at how Deonar's problems are too many to fix, the waste just wouldn't stop coming and the crisis would never end.
A dexterously crafted nonfiction work that never once feels tedious, a fine debut and a very essential read.
Thank you so much Hachette India for providing me with a copy of this book.
